Spec sheets said "up to" a modest uplift over the previous generation's ray-tracing path. Our frame-time captures across three of this year's most demanding titles tell a different story.
The setup
We ran identical settings — same resolution, same quality preset, same in-game benchmark sequence — across the previous and current hardware generation, capturing full frame-time graphs rather than just an averaged frame-rate number.
What we found
The averaged frame-rate improvement matched the marketing claim almost exactly. But the frame-time consistency — how evenly spaced each frame is, which is what actually determines how smooth a game feels — improved far beyond what the headline number implied, particularly in scenes with dense reflective geometry.
The 1% low frame-time figure, the metric most associated with perceived stutter, improved more than the average frame rate did in two of the three titles we tested.
Why the spec sheet undersells it
Marketing benchmarks are almost always built around averaged throughput because it's a single clean number. Consistency gains don't compress into a single figure the same way — which is exactly why they tend to go unmentioned, even when they're the more meaningful improvement for how a game actually plays.
